Many
historical texts relate the famous Spanish Armada battle of 1588, between the
Spanish fleet and its English counterpart, as a sort of isolated, signal
military confrontation that radically and immediately altered the fortunes of
its two combatants.As the story is
often related, Spain,
the great power in Europe prior to the
engagement, reeled in the face of abject defeat, ceding control of the seas to
the island nation to the north.You’ve
probably heard that England and northern Europe in general were now free to
engage in unfettered exploration and colonize the Western Hemisphere and North
America in particular, a region which had hitherto been a satellite of Spain
and its seafaring neighbor on the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal.Spain receded into political and
military insignificance, it is claimed, while England cannibalized its New World
Empire and rose to prominence.Yet this
description of the Spanish Armada encounter, which is distressingly common, is
also grossly inaccurate, and it fails entirely to depict the surprising
aftermath of the naval battle—in which Spain would paradoxically reinforce its
power on the high seas, not witness its decline.Spain’s naval resurgence would have massive
ramifications that reverberate even today— affecting the map of the Americas,
augmenting the power of England’s Parliament by draining revenues from the
Crown, even implicating Ireland and its tormented history into the mix.

The Spanish
Armada clash was not an isolated conflict, but merely one battle in a long,
bitter war that embroiled not just Spain and England, but
all of Western Europe in the ambitions of Spain’s King
Philip II.This “20 Years’ War”
stretched from the mid 1580s to 1604, and it was nothing less than the first
world war:Its battles were waged on the
European landmass and in the jungles of Panama and the Caribbean, in the warm
waters off Europe’s Atlantic Coast, nourished by the Gulf Stream, and in the
cold brine of the Pacific vastness.Indeed, the course of events following the Spanish Armada is
fascinating, and in many ways quite the contrary to what is conventionally
assumed and described.Perhaps the
single most crucial encounter of the war was not the Spanish Armada battle
itself, but a lesser-known clash between Spain and England at sea
and on land in 1589, the year following Spain’s invasion of England.It was in this year that an English Armada under the partial
command of that renowned privateer, Sir Francis Drake, mounted a bold
amphibious operation, motivated by a triple set of objectives to break the
power of the Spanish crown.It was
nearly successful, but ultimately its defeat was total and replete with drastic
consequences.

The outcome
of the 1589 battle would have momentous consequences for the history of
settlement in the Western Hemisphere, for the
balance of power on the European Continent, even for the melancholy and tragic
history of Ireland.Most importantly, contrary to what is so
often assumed, Spain
would emerge strengthened in the decade following the Armada, with a fortified
navy that was finally capable of fending off buccaneer attacks and reliably
transporting precious metals from the Americas.Elizabethan England would be on the losing
end of most of the remaining battles with Spain, both on land and at sea, and
would be plunged into debt and disarray, its colonial ambitions thwarted and
its resources sapped in a draining guerrilla war in Ireland.England definitely did not rule the
seas following the Armada incident; Spain would control the waters for
many decades more before passing control to the Dutch, to be followed by a
titanic clash between England
and France
for hegemony over the sea routes in the 1700s.The history of the Anglo-Spanish War of the late 1500s is far more
intricate than the headline history usually reported in regard to the Armada,
yet vastly more intriguing as well.The
hinge point of the conflict was not the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588,
but the debacle of the English one in 1589.Central to both incidents was the still-fascinating figure of that
legendary English seaman, Sir Francis Drake, and a closer look at the 1589
Expedition to Spain
and Portugal
helps to further illuminate Drake’s character in all its extraordinary
multidimensionality.The defeat of the
English Armada in 1589, lesser-known yet remarkably significant event in its
consequences, is related here in this article.

The 16th Century and the
Backdrop to the Anglo-Spanish Clash

The late 15th
century had seen changes that shook the world; it was one of the most
formative hundred-year periods in recorded history.Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine
Empire, had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the capture of the ancient
city heralding the demise of the Eastern half of the old Roman
Empire, whose Western half had crumbled nearly a millennium
before.European merchants and kingdoms
were suddenly compelled to seek alternative trading routes to attain the
coveted spices of the East.Making its
first appearance in the southwestern German city of Mainz, in the 1440s, Johannes Gutenberg’s
printing press would revolutionize the globe, enabling the rapid transmission
of information, encouraging the spread of education, and midwifing the
emergence of the Scientific Revolution, the Reformation, and the
Enlightenment.Gutenberg’s invention was
the fundamental catalyst for the rapid historical changes of the next two
centuries, and thus fostered the first global Information Age.Furthermore, the Portuguese would initiate
the European Age of Exploration, mastering the navigational nuances and
shipbuilding techniques that would open Europe
to the world.Portugal’s
neighbor, Spain,
would quickly join in the enterprise of exploration, and sponsor an expedition
that would radically alter the course of history.In 1492 an Italian sailor, known to the
Anglophone world as Christopher Columbus, would discover a new world for his
Spanish sponsor, bringing Europe into contact
with the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica.Few events in history have had such an
earth-shattering impact as those of the late 1400s, and the opening of two new
continents to Western Europe would reshape the
balance of power in the Old World.

Spain and Portugal
derived enormous wealth from their discoveries in the form of precious metals
and slaves, along with new foodstuffs that would rescue Europe
from a potential nutritional crisis as its population mushroomed.Throughout the 16th century, the
sea routes of the Atlantic Ocean were dotted
from one horizon to the other with the characteristic sight of Spanish treasure
galleons transporting immense hauls of gold and silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru.Inevitably, such sudden prosperity inspired
envy in other West European nations with Atlantic coastlines, who coveted Spain’s newfound affluence and its New World
empire in the Western Hemisphere.The English had initiated their own Age of
Exploration four years after Columbus’s
voyage, with England’s
King Henry VII chartering an Italian sailor, Giovanni Caboto—better known as
John Cabot—to undertake his own expeditions to the New
World.Alighting in Newfoundland in 1497,
Cabot claimed North America for King Henry,
and his voyages led to the establishment of small fishing settlements off
present-day Canada
and New England.However, the Western
Hemisphere remained largely a zone of Spanish influence for most
of the 1500s, until the Iberian country’s snowballing wealth prompted more
concerted actions by France
and England
to partake in the riches by the middle of the century.When Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses at
the WittenbergChurch in 1519, the Protestant
Reformation was commenced, and the commercial rivalry among Western
Europe’s powers would acquire a bitter religious tinge as
Catholics and Protestants vied for foreign influence.

16th
century Europe featured a human epicenter in the towering personage of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V who, via a remarkable web of dynastic links, reigned over a vast
landmass extending from the Netherlands to the Italian provinces, from the
Central European landmass to Spain.It
was Charles V who presided over and consolidated the vast realms acquired for Spain by
Conquistadors like Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, and it was he who
first directed his Imperial troops against the dispersing wave of the
Protestant Reformation in Germany.Charles opined that his Empire was far too
vast for one individual to govern alone, so at his abdication he split his
realm, giving his son, King Philip II, control over his Western domains,
chiefly Spain,the Netherlands,
Sardinia, and parts of Italy.In classic
Hapsburg style, Philip was enlisted to forge further dynastic links by marrying
England’s Princess and then
Queen Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, the powerful English monarch who had
founded the modern national English navy and whose marriage tribulations
incited him to break with Rome
and found the Protestant Church of England.Upon her accession to the throne, Mary, an ardent Catholic, sought
unsuccessfully to roll back many of the Protestant reforms instituted by her
father.She disliked and even despised
her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, imprisoning the latter in the Tower of London for a time and apparently even
threatening her with execution.(It was
Philip, ironically, who interceded against this in favor of Elizabeth, and even when their two countries
entered into conflict later, Philip and Elizabeth maintained an unusual degree
of mutual respect.)

In 1558,
Mary died childless and, in accordance with the terms of Henry VIII’s will, Elizabeth was selected as Queen Elizabeth I by
Parliament.At the time of Elizabeth’s coronation,
oddly enough, England
and Spain
were on relatively cordial terms and may have even been fairly characterized as
allies.Both had rivalries with and were
suspicious of the power of France.Henry VIII had waged war with France late in
his reign, the latest eruption in hostilities between the two ancient
rivals.Mary I and Elizabeth I also
invaded northern France
during the 1550s and early 1560s over the disputed region of Calais.The French were victorious in both cases, permanently expelling the
English from the European Continent and further aggravating the mutual enmity
between the two countries.Philip,
meanwhile, had designs on the French throne and a keen interest in suppressing
the Protestant Huguenot movement headquartered in northern France, and he
was suspicious of France’s
intentions toward settlement in the Americas.Although a marriage alliance between the
Catholic Philip and the Protestant Elizabeth was out of the question, the prior
matrimonial link between Philip and Mary had assured a degree of common
interest between Spain
and England.Spain’s imperial status and
incredible wealth were undoubtedly desired by its neighbors, but there was
little hint of the bloody conflict that would embroil Spain and England later
in the century.This changed, however,
when the English broke into the slave trade in 1562.

The
repugnant yet extremely profitable business of trafficking in black African
slaves had been initiated by the Portuguese in the 1400s, and by the mid-1500s Spain had
gained a monopoly on the trade’s most lucrative side—selling the captured West
Africans to eager mine foremen and plantation operators in the Americas.Spain resented smugglers and
jealously guarded its advantage in the sordid trade, but inevitably others
sought a piece of the action with the English themselves soon becoming
involved.The first English slave trader
was a bearded, salty, yet gentlemanly sailor named John Hawkins.A cousin of the renowned Sir Francis Drake
and himself an accomplished mariner, Hawkins had gained considerable experience
on the high seas when he began to voyage along the West African coast in the
early 1560s, where he learned of the Atlantic slave markets and the
extraordinary prosperity conferred upon the Iberian traders who ran and partook
in them.Hawkins undertook his first
slaving expedition in 1562, making a tidy profit on his human cargo which he
promptly reported to Queen Elizabeth I.The Queen was initially disapproving of Hawkins’ entrepreneurial
undertakings, but dropped her opposition when Hawkins revealed the extent of
his profits and, in short order, herself underwrote Hawkins’ next two slaving
expeditions (along with highly placed members of her Privy Council), providing
ships and other material assistance.Elizabeth’s decision has provoked many “what-ifs” among historical
observers, since the support she so rapidly gave to Hawkins’ slave-trading
probably entrenched England more deeply in the bloody enterprise far more than
if she had admonished him for it; human trafficking, after all, now had the
imprimatur of a royal sanction to justify it, muting antislavery protests that
were already springing up.Nevertheless,
we have to remember that Elizabeth
had inherited a relatively cash-strapped, indebted kingdom from Queen Mary, and
in the context of the situation, she and the Privy Council probably sensed an
unexpected financial windfall that, for all its vices, was too good an
opportunity to pass up.

In any
case, the royal support for Hawkins’ slave-trading encouraged him to continue
it, something that the Spanish had noticed and did not appreciate.Spain had maintained a virtual
monopoly over the slave trade by requiring mariners from all nations to pass
through Spanish ports, Seville
in particular, from which Spanish authorities were able to obtain a cut of the
profits gleaned by the traders.In the
eyes of Spanish officials, Hawkins’ direct sale to the West Indies constituted
smuggling, and they were determined to halt they perceived as the shipment of
contraband to the Caribbean islands.On
his third voyage, in 1567, Hawkins led a 6-ship slave-trading fleet with
himself and his cousin Francis Drake in personal command of two of the
ships.In 1568, the vessels were
compelled to water at San Juan de Ulua, near Veracruz, Mexico,
to obtain supplies and materials for repair.The Spanish viceroy, Martin Enriquez, saw an opportunity to punish the
smugglers and directed his own fleet to bombard the English; only Hawkins’ and
Drake’s ships, both damaged, managed to escape the Spanish noose.Beaten and seasick from a storm they later
encountered, the two mariners eventually arrived at port back in England,
enraged by what they saw as appalling treachery on the part of the
Spaniards.Like many other English,
French, Dutch, and even Spanish and Portuguese sailors, they would turn to
piracy and buccaneering, which they viewed not as criminal acts but as the only
means to respond to what they saw as an oppressive policy by the Spanish crown
to hoard the wealth of Atlantic trade into its own coffers.More importantly, the San Juan de Ulua
confrontation constituted a diplomatic incident that would fracture the
hitherto amicable relations between Spain and England.It is doubtful that King Philip had any kind
of personal role in his viceroy’s interception of Hawkins’ convoy; 2-way radios
and telegraphy were 3 centuries away from being invented, and naval commanders
therefore had considerable autonomy in their actions.Nevertheless, Philip could not reprimand or
incarcerate Enriquez for merely enforcing a stated Spanish policy against
contraband, even if the viceroy may have been a bit overzealous in his
duties.

Layered on
top of the San Juan de Ulua incident was a gradual crescendo of antipathy in England toward
Philip’s zealous Catholic belligerency.England had
been Protestant since Henry VIII’s break with Rome—the king had so thoroughly devastated
the Catholic Church’s presence and its English assets that Queen Mary’s
interlude did little to restore a Catholic power base, especially with regard
to the aristocracy.Philip had earned a
reputation as the quintessential Holy Warrior for the Church in its
Counterreformation efforts, a role that he relished, and not only English
citizens but also Catholic Italians, French, even Portuguese regarded his ardor
and machinations with trepidation.The Netherlands in
particular became a flash point.Several
provinces in the northern Dutch Lowlands began to publicly espouse
Protestantism and found a clever underground leader in the person of William
the Silent of Orange, who waged a crafty war of attrition and harassment in the
1570s against the Netherlands’
Spanish overlords that Philip was not able to suppress.English religious sympathy for Dutch
Protestants was coupled with considerable dismay about the adverse effects of
Spanish military actions on the valuable commercial markets for English goods
that had long existed in the Low Countries.The Protestant Huguenots of France also
inspired sympathy across the English Channel,
especially in the aftermath of the gratuitously bloody slaughter of 20,000 of
them by French Catholics in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.The Spanish, for their part, took exception
to what they viewed as repression and disenfranchisement of English (and
eventually Irish) Catholics.Henry VIII
had executed many clerics, shuttered monasteries, and confiscated Church
property, sending numerous Catholics into exile.England’s shift toward
Protestantism had progressed too far to be reversed entirely, but many
Spaniards began to see themselves as at least the protectors of England’s
Catholic population, just as some English cast themselves as the defenders of
Dutch, French, and German Protestants on the Continent.The religious strife intensified when Pope Pius V shocked Elizabeth by excommunicating her in 1570 from
the Catholic Church and absolving English Catholics from recognizing her
authority.Elizabeth had theretofore shown little
inclination to support Continental Protestant rebels; like her father, she was
an absolutist monarch who deeply resented challenges to the reign from within,
and she feared that support for Continental rebels could rebound across the
Channel to buttress similar insurgencies in England and Ireland.However, the pontiff’s bull of
excommunication changed matters, since it led her to identify more with the
Protestant movement.She came to support
the Dutch rebels and Huguenots, and she sponsored measures against Catholics
within the English realm, as many were suspected of disloyalty or questionable
reliability.Catholics complained of
persecution, and many departed England in exile.

These
mirror-image resentments—Spanish bitterness at England’s treatment of its
Catholics, English sympathy for the plucky Dutch Protestants and the underdog
French Huguenots— melded with still-smoldering resentment at Spain over San
Juan de Ulua and commercial competition to fuel the conditions for
conflict.The English, French, and Dutch
were also harboring ambitions to establish their own colonies in the Americas;
what is now St. Augustine, Florida, was originally a French Huguenot
settlement—Ft. Caroline—prior to being overrun and crushed by invading Spanish
forces.The English themselves would
undertake several, ultimately unsuccessful attempts to establish a permanent
settlement in the 1570s and 1580s to colonize North America at Newfoundland and
what is now the Middle Atlantic region (Virginia) of the U.S.Their colonial ambitions had been fermenting
ever since John Cabot had whetted their appetites by establishing a fishing
settlement at Newfoundland
and claiming the land for King Henry VII.Thus the stage was set for hostilities to erupt between England and Spain, and from
the 1570s to 1585, the two nations would wage a low-grade conflict on the high
seas in the form of quasi-organized privateering missions led by Sir Francis
Drake.

Sea Dogs, Deteriorating Relations, and
the Spanish Armada

Drake and Hawkins were at the vanguard of the
sporadic but damaging buccaneering attacks on Spanish shipping and New World ports
in the 1570s, joining a multinational assemblage of pirates in raiding the
gold- and silver-laden treasure fleets that the Spaniards regularly shuttled
between the mines of Peru and the ports of Barcelona and Cadiz.Drake in particular spearheaded numerous
expeditions against the “perfidious foes” from Spain, striking deep into the
heart of New Spain with audacious raids into Panama and the West Indies and
numerous ambushes on the high seas.In
1577-1580, Drake became only the second sea commander (after Spain’s Juan
Sebastian del Cano, a survivor of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition) to
circumnavigate the globe, in the process laying a claim to New Albion (Spanish
California) that was never followed up but served as inspiration to future
generations of English mariners.In the
next decade, Drake made famous raids into the Caribbean and distinguished
himself especially against Spanish defenses in Hispaniola in 1586, and in the
following year he even managed to besiege the enemy at the lion’s den itself,
arriving at Cadiz to torch a portion of the Spanish fleet.His operations were not always successful;
many English sailors perished from disease or were felled by Spanish gunfire in
his offensives, and for all the fanfare of the 1587 Cadiz raid, the Spaniards
had in fact repulsed his attack, thwarting his main objective of a sack of the
port city.Yet Drake’s reputation as “El
Drache,” the Dragon of the High Seas, was at least partly deserved.He was an undoubtedly brave and resourceful
commander, skilled both in the technical nuances of wind-driven navigation and
capable of inspiring loyalty in his sailors, whether battle-hardened or
untested.He could improvise his way out
of potential disasters and demonstrated remarkable skill both at intelligence-gathering
and contingency plans.To his credit,
Drake was also unusually magnanimous toward his adversaries; in an often
ruthless time centuries before the Geneva Conventions or other such standards,
Drake neither executed nor physically harmed Spanish soldiers that he had
captured.Often, his only “punishment”
was to read Scriptural passages to the captive and attempt to convert him to
the Protestant cause.Drake in
particular came to personify the relentless English “sea dog,” the prototypical
privateering pirate who led freelance operations against the Spanish treasure
fleets and Empire for the gain of his country.

John
Hawkins, while less directly taking part in anti-Spanish buccaneering,
nonetheless bolstered English seafaring prowess as Treasurer of the Navy from
1577, in which capacity he modernized the English fleet.The original thinker and crucial innovator of
the 16th-century English navy was Henry VIII, who equipped his
majestic royal vessels with long-range guns that could be fired more accurately
and frequently than the ordnance then commonly in use.Hawkins further implemented Henry’s
innovations while improving on them substantially.As the naval treasurer, he competently
managed the navy’s finances while redesigning the fleet to favor smaller, more
maneuverable vessels, endowing them with a remarkable degree of
seaworthiness.He directed metallurgic
foundries specifically toward the task of arming the English ships for
long-range attack, even appropriating merchant vessels ad hoc for use in coastal defenses.Hawkins was the astute mind behind the rapid-reaction force model for
the English sailing fleet, and he did a more than competent job of ensuring
that the sailing ships were in proper condition for meeting a powerful enemy
squadron in the warm waters of the English Channel.He also participated hands-on in the
pre-fitting and mission planning for the deep-water vessels used by Drake and
his buccaneering colleagues to harass Spanish shipping.

Hawkins’
contributions to the English navy were valuable in the run-up to the Spanish
Armada clash of 1588.The Spaniards
respected Drake and the other privateers for their valor and undoubted
seafaring skill, yet they were understandably not altogether thrilled by the
economic detriment and general interference in their shipping posed by the sea
dogs.The religious rhetoric on
Protestant and Catholic sides alike became more strident, and the English began
to more openly support the Protestant Dutch Revolt against Catholic Spain as
the insurgents proved their staying power.Following the assassination of William the Silent in 1584, the French
monarchy itself imploded the next year, turning France not only into a
religious battleground among rival groups but a beckoning battlefield for
foreign forces intent on imposing their designs upon French territory.The crisis on the Continent provoked action
in England, and hostilities between the English and Spanish erupted openly
when, in 1585, the English dispatched 7,000 soldiers under Robert Dudley, the
Earl of Leicester, to support the Dutch Protestant uprising.Leicester’s operations in 1585 accomplished
little against the professional army of the Spanish, but the gauntlet had now
been officially thrown down; England and Spain were at war.The simmering religious tensions exploded
into rage on the part of the Spaniards when Queen Elizabeth reluctantly
authorized the beheading of her archrival, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, in
1587.Mary had been imprisoned for over
a decade and been implicated in several assassination plots against Elizabeth,
but she was still viewed by some Catholics as the rightful ruler and at least
the symbolic protector of English Catholics in the country.English interference in the Low Countries and
the unabated depredations of the buccaneers had already irritated the Spanish,
but Mary’s execution proved to be the last straw.Philip began to organize an invasion force
against the island nation.Led by the
Duke of Medina Sidonia, this Spanish Armada would be
dispatched in the “Enterprise of England,” to rendezvous with a fleet
transporting the army of Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma,
toward the shores of England.The plan
suffered from the simple difficulty of communication between the two Spanish
fleets and Philip’s lack of a warm-water port in northwest Europe, yet the
Spaniards proceeded with their plan in 1588, three years following the formal
commencement of hostilities against the English nation.

The Repulse of the Spanish and the
Invasion of the English Armada

As is
well-known, the Spanish Armada failed in its invasion quest, a debacle
attributable primarily to some of the worst September storms witnessed by
seafaring Atlantic mariners during the entire busy century of the 1500s.All in all, the Armada and the English fleet
largely fought each other to a stalemate before the Spanish forces, led by the
Duke of Medina Sidonia, decided to forsake the effort for the time being and
sail around the tip of Scotland and Ireland back to Spain.It was here that Spanish sailors were tested
in a baptism by fire, with ferocious ocean storms battering their sails and
challenging every technical faculty in their stock of experience.Some Spanish ships foundered or were
shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland; but most managed to return, battered yet
intact, to the Spanish ports, which had carefully prepared provisions and
medical facilities as well as co-opted the resources of nearby coastal towns to
tend to wounded soldiers and sailors and nurse them back to health.The Spanish reversal in 1588 was not nearly
as severe or damaging as is often assumed, one of many surprising facts that
has been confused in the frequently-unexamined mythology of the Armada
conflict.I’ve dedicated a separate
brief article to dismantling these numerous myths and related the detailed
story of the Spanish Armada—its
motivations, the circumstances of the battle itself, and its repercussions—in
the same article.

Since this
particular essay is focused on the so-called English Armada that sailed against
Spain and Portugal in 1589, the key take-home message of the Spanish Armada is that its
failure to invade in 1588 did not represent
a decisive Spanish defeat, nor did it in itself pose a serious challenge to
Spanish naval power or King Philip’s war aims (which were principally directed
against the Netherlands, France, and other theaters of combat on the European
Continent).To truly inflict a decisive
blow against Spain, England had to follow up the Armada’s repulse with an
offensive of its own, and thus it was a little-known encounter in 1589—the
subject of this article—that represented the pivotal clash of the Anglo-Spanish
“Twenty Years’ War” of 1585-1604.The
outcome of the 1589 battle truly would be of crucial importance to the
unfolding of world events.The English,
like the French and Dutch, had looked upon Spain’s New World Empire with a
longing for their own.They did not
accept Spain’s claims to the territories of Central and South America, where
Spanish missionaries mingled with the cultures of the great Aztec, Maya, and
Inca civilizations and Spanish galleons hauled countless tons of gold and
silver.The American continent and the
Caribbean would long be disputed, and Spain’s fragile hold of these regions
depended partly on entrenched defenses but, most importantly, on King Philip’s
formidable Atlantic fleet.The Spanish ships
guarded and blocked many of the Atlantic sea lanes, not only denying access to
South America and the Caribbean but frustrating settlement in North
America.

As the
Armada limped back into port following its battering by furious oceanic
weather, the English—Privy Council member Sir Francis Walsingham in
particular—sensed a rare and extraordinary opportunity.Although most of Spain’s ships had managed to
return to Iberian ports, they would need refitting and repairs before they
could truly be seaworthy again.English
intelligence indicated that the Spanish fleet—with its hardy Atlantic
nucleus—was concentrated in Santander and San Sebastian, in northern Spain on
the Bay of Biscay.As it was being
refitted, it was also rendered remarkably vulnerable to English attack and
destruction by flames.As R.B. Wernham
noted [p. 96]:“The whole remaining navy
of Spain lay helpless in those two ports.There were not enough sailors to man them, not enough workmen to refit
them speedily, and their soldiers had dispersed to winter quarters twelve leagues
inland.For months the ships must lie
there, powerless to move or to fight.”

A
successful strike against the stationary Spanish squadrons would have had
history-making consequences.Deprived of
the core of his Atlantic fleet, Philip not only would have been impaired in his
capacity to wage war in Europe; he also would have lost his capacity to
effectively guard and secure his New World Empire.The Americas would have been rapidly opened
to competitors, and Spain’s own uncertain grip on its New World possessions
would have been pried free.Argentina
and Peru may have become the first colonies of the British Empire.Spanish colonies in North America would have
been stillborn as the English and French were finally free to exploit their
frustrated ambitions in the 16th century.The Spanish treasure galleons still lingered
as a mouth-watering prize, and a major precious metals transport was moving
into Iberian waters in 1589.Moreover,
King Philip’s grip on Portugal—which he had conquered in 1580—was in question,
and a Portuguese pretender, Dom Antonio, proclaimed overlordship of the country
in lieu of Philip himself.Divesting
Philip of Portugal would have wrested away a valuable naval resource for Spain
and deprived it of ports, experienced sailors, and New World possessions.

Thus it was
that Walsingham, Elizabeth, and England’s best seamen opted to launch an
offensive operation against the Spanish in their own home ports.Time was of the essence.The English would launch an invasion of the
Iberian Peninsula with a three-pronged series of aims:(1) To destroy the Spanish fleet then moored
and being refitted at Santander and San Sebastian, the main objective of the
mission as outlined by the Queen and Privy Council; (2) to intercept the
Spanish silver fleet entering from the Western Hemisphere and gain control of
the Azores Islands of Portugal, thus depriving the Spanish king of the wealth
underwriting his European campaigns and enabling him to expand his navy, while
diverting those riches to the North Atlantic; and (3) to expel the Spanish from
Portugal and replace Philip’s usurpers with Dom Antonio, proclaiming him the
rightful ruler of the country.It would
be led by none other than Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris, two naval
commanders of distinguished performance and longstanding experience on the high
seas.This military operation has been
recorded under several names:“the
Expedition to Portugal,” “the Drake-Norris Expedition (after its two
commanders),” “the 1589 Expedition,” and so forth.But in the interest of that always delicate
art of felicitous brand-naming, perhaps it is most useful to regard this
English invasion force for what it was:the counterpoint and mirror image of its opposing predecessor the year
before, an English Armada as it were.Thus, an English Armada was prepared in 1589 to fulfill the triple
objectives as outlined above.

The English Armada’s Fitful Assemblage

As noted in
the accompanying essay dispelling many myths about the Spanish Armada, the
scattering of the Spanish ships hardly translated into a triumphant moment for
the long-suffering English sailors who had manned the coastal defenses.A horrific outbreak of infectious disease—possibly
typhus or plague—exploded into an epidemic among the English sea-borne forces,
claiming hundreds and perhaps thousands of lives.The outbreak added bitter insult to the
grievous injury that had long plagued the English military apparatus:The troops, for all their perseverance and
sacrifice, had largely not been paid in months.Irate epithets were regularly directed against the Queen, the Privy
Council, and in particular poor William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the Treasurer and
Queen Elizabeth’s most trusted advisor, who had found himself constantly
hard-pressed to scrape together compensation for English troops and their
Continental Dutch and Huguenot allies.It seemed infuriatingly ironic that the foot soldiers, having endured
months of discomfort and physical agony to defend England’s shores, would be
“rewarded” for their efforts by being forced into debt by a government that was
supposed to have paid their soldiers’ wages.Yet this frustrating state of affairs was hardly unusual, and it was emblematic
of the financial troubles that would plague the English war effort against
Spain and pose an especially acute challenge to the funding of the English
Armada of 1589.

Queen
Elizabeth had inherited a staggering debt of close to £3,000,000 from her half-sister
Mary I upon her accession in 1558, but she and Cecil had shown commendable
fiscal discipline in returning England to relative solvency over the next three
decades.Outside of a failed operation
to capture Le Havre and Calais from the French in the first three years of her
reign, Elizabeth largely refrained from the kinds of money-squandering military
adventures in which her father had too often indulged, and the Queen and
Council’s relative parsimony in the costs of the court helped to gradually
bring the Exchequer back to a level of manageable debt, if not quite outright
balancing.The Crown’s revenues from the
slave trade and its “plausibly denied” support of buccaneering also helped to
buttress royal income, but the most important source of royal capital inflows
came with the burgeoning wool and textile trade carried on with the Low
Countries and the German Hanseatic League.This financial wellspring was important enough that, alongside the
Protestant sympathies with the Dutch insurgents, the English had a discernible
financial interest in preventing King Philip’s garrisons in Holland from
interfering with the lucrative wool trade—a further potential spur to induce
English intervention in the Netherlands.

War with
Spain, however, would present an exacting and inexorable challenge to English
finances far above and beyond what Elizabeth had encountered before in her
reign, and threaten to undo much of the patient budget-juggling that she and
the Privy Council had undertaken in the previous thirty years.The costs of the Armada defense had nearly
drained the Exchequer of its last pence, and financing an offensive operation
in 1589 would not be a simple task.The
costs of the expedition were well-justified if King Philip’s navy could be
destroyed, and a successful interception of the Spanish silver fleet might even
have enabled the invaders to turn a profit from the war.However, the not-insubstantial expenses of
assembling the fleet and fairly remunerating the sailors would pose an
additional drag on the already strained English finances.The fiscal challenge would become so severe
that it, in many respects, would become the dominant obstacle to the success of
the mission and, as we shall see, it would greatly impact the military and
strategic missions of Drake and Norris on the ground when they reached Spain
and Portugal.

Close to
12,000 soldiers were needed for an adequate invasion force, some of them
English but a part of the contingent also comprised of battle-hardened Dutch
veterans and German mercenaries.Since
the Dutch had a vested interest alongside the English in a blow to King Philip,
Elizabeth naturally expected her Continental allies to foot part of the bill,
but disputes over financial outlays and troop commitments set the English and
Dutch allies at loggerheads, with many Dutch contingents resenting what they
saw as an overly demanding stance on the part of Elizabeth and the Privy
Council.In any case, arguments over the
specifics of cost-sharing and troop provisions were at least partly smoothed
out by a point of common financial interest among all parties.The second objective in the triad of war
aims—seizure of the Spanish treasure fleet and maintenance of control in the
Azores islands—dangled a carrot before potential participants in the operation
in the form of war booty, and it even helped to encourage further investment
from individuals and groups with mercenary aims to support the military
operation.Such “joint-stock companies”
would furnish valuable funds to purchase supplies and victuals for Drake and
Norris’s attack force; it was as though investors had been drawn to pump
capital into a market whose companies were explicitly designed to abscond with
silver mined by the Spaniards in their own empire!This financing scheme, clever as it was in
spreading the burden of costs, also yet posed a tremendous complication that
would turn out to be surprisingly troublesome.Specifically, there was a latent conflict of war aims:Were the English invaders and their Dutch and
German allies seeking to break King Philip’s Atlantic naval power and expel him
from Portugal, or were they trying to secure a profit for themselves by seizing
his treasure fleets?

For
understandable reasons, the political backers of the English Armada—Queen
Elizabeth and Walsingham in particular—viewed the destruction of the Spanish
fleet at Santander and San Sebastian as by far the most critical war aim.It was only success in this mission that
could possibly deprive Philip of his ample means to wage war on the European
Continent, and it was only by destruction of the Spanish Atlantic fleet that
Spain’s coveted New World Empire would be opened to plundering and
recolonization by the country’s hungry competitors in Western Europe.Yet the mouth-watering prospect of the
capture of vast Mediterranean Spanish galleons, laden from bow to stern with
precious metals and jewels, obviously fired the imagination of the often
indigent or merchant-class sailors and small investors who were carrying out
and bolstering the operation, and you can guess which war aim they found
especially pressing.The practical
result of this was to instantly sow mutual distrust and suspicion in the minds
of Elizabeth and her commanders.She
suspected—probably with some justification—that Drake, Norris, and their
sailors did not share the same mission priorities as she and her Privy Council
espoused, being more interested in plunder of the Spanish treasure fleets, a
secondary objective in her mind, than the pivotal attacks against King Philip’s
naval forces at Santander and San Sebastian.Drake and Norris, for their part, chronically questioned whether they
would be adequately and promptly supplied by the Queen in their endeavors, and
they seemed to have felt a frustrating sense that Queen Elizabeth and the Privy
Council did not fully comprehend the logistical challenge of landing an attack
force in northern Spain only to disembark, in short order, on another mission
to the Azores and Portugal proper.

This is
where the situation takes an especially ironic twist, one of several that would
send the 1589 Expedition to Portugal lunging in bizarrely unexpected
directions.The trials and tribulations
of the Spanish Armada ships upon the return voyage to Spain wound up, strangely
enough, posing an acute challenge to the English in the context of the 1589
mission.Medina Sidonia’s Spanish Armada
fleet was supposed to arrive at Lisbon, in Portugal, and at the primary Spanish
ports of Coruna and Cadiz.As Wernham
perceptively noticed [pp. 95-96], had the Spaniards landed their ships where
they were supposed to, the political objectives of Elizabeth and the Privy
Council would have dovetailed more easily with the more pecuniary aspirations
of Drake, Norris, and their sailors:Upon putting the Spanish navy to the torch in Lisbon and Coruna, Drake
and Norris could have then easily taken advantage of favorable geography to
alight in Portugal to fulfill the third objective of expelling the Spanish
viceroy and placing Dom Antonio on the Portuguese throne.They could have then proceeded overland from
Lisbon and set off for the Azores to snatch the coveted treasure fleet sailing
in from the West Indies.Yet the
unrelenting winds of the Atlantic voyage and the choppy seas had compelled
Medina Sidonia to land, unexpectedly, at Santander and San Sebastian, something
that had disappointed the Spaniards as much as it would vex the English;
refitting the ships at these sites would take longer and pose more of a
logistical headache than if they had entered port at Coruna or Lisbon.In any case, Drake and Norris now perceived a
bald conflict in their war aims.Santander and San Sebastian both lay deep to the east on Spain’s
northern face fronting the Bay of Biscay, and prevailing winds from the west
meant that—after dropping anchor and burning the Spanish fleet at those two
ports—the English would have to sail against the wind and round the northwest
edge of Spain to reach Lisbon and the coveted position in the Azores.Even in the event of permissive weather, the
delay would likely enable the Spaniards to mount defenses in Portugal and
possibly thwart interception of the treasure fleet.Thus while the Queen and Privy Council
clearly emphasized the Santander/San Sebastian mission first and foremost, the
sailors and their investors were inclined to demur privately if not to the
monarch directly; they were more desirous of a strike at Portugal initially to
avoid letting the silver fleet slip away.

Invasion

The English
Armada was assembled in Plymouth beginning in February of 1589, but untoward
winds, failure to deliver supplies, and personal infighting postponed its
departure, buying crucial weeks for King Philip to refit his damaged navy,
protect the incoming silver fleet, and invite assistance from the Hanseatic
League and the Baltic states.The
prelude to the English Armada’s disembarkation was replete with carping and
mutual recriminations of incompetence and blinding self-interest among the
mission’s backers and participants.Queen Elizabeth had been growing intensely aggravated by the delays and
the nagging sense that a rare opportunity to smash the enemy was gradually
slipping away, and she still did not fully trust the intentions of her
commanders.Wernham notes [p. 94] that
she had assented to a contribution of £49,000, well above the £20,000 that was
supposed to represent her share.Her
exasperation was only further exacerbated when a bright, valorous, yet
impetuous young courtier named Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, stole away
on April 5 with his shipmate Roger Williams on the Swiftsure on an impromptu, quixotic attack against Portugal—further
augmenting fears that the English Armada had a different destination in mind
from the shipyards of Santander and San Sebastian.Essex was the epitome of the bold and
erratically competent Romantic warrior who had not yet learned that the better
part of valor was discretion.He
contributed measurably to many English operations, but his early departure here
added a further layer of confusion to the invasion plans; Drake and Norris were
hemmed in by winds for another two weeks before they were finally able to
disembark and head for the Iberian Peninsula.

When Drake
and Norris finally sighted the coast of their quarry, they were not anywhere
near Santander or San Sebastian, as Queen Elizabeth had hoped.They were not even in Lisbon.Perhaps acting on faulty intelligence, Drake
had alighted in Coruna, one of the main Spanish ports which was on the path
toward Lisbon but almost deserted of Spanish naval targets aside from a few
hulks, small craft, and one of the least seaworthy of the Spanish “large
ships.”The mission had already assumed
a Monty Python-esque quality in some respects, complete with irritated
bickering among commanders who were supposed to be cooperating, soldiers
dreaming of fast money, and an impetuous young courtier with visions of
military laurels departing for battle two weeks in advance of the main
force.Drake’s landing party effectively
sacked the lower city of Coruna (which was separated from the walled upper
city) and captured or killed many Spanish soldiers, then managed to uncover and
appropriate large stashes of provisions for themselves.In yet another comically bizarre twist in the
invasion, however, the Coruna soldiers also found a cornucopia of wine casks,
which proved to be far more deadly to the English than all the Spanish cannon
and artillery in the city.The English
proceeded to drink themselves into a stupor and become more plastered than an
office party on casual Friday’s happy hour; needless to say, they were not
exactly in prime fighting condition to lay siege to the walled upper city.

At this
point, yet another still-inexplicable element of the invasion crept into the
picture.Queen Elizabeth had promised
Drake and Norris an ample supply of siege trains to attack and overcome the
defenses of the walled cities that they knew they would encounter in Spain and
Portugal.But the Queen ultimately never
delivered the artillery, a fact that seems to have irritated Drake immensely
and which he used as a justification for his refusal, on several occasions, to
attack otherwise vulnerable fortresses.In fact, in the context of the previous discussion, the Queen’s actions
may have been entirely consistent with her apprehensions; she wanted her
generals to focus on Santander and San Sebastian before making any attempt
against Lisbon, and her refusal to supply the artillery may have been a subtle
hint that they had to complete the simple and most important task—torching the
Spanish fleet moored in northern Spain—before they would be offered the
artillery for the far more lucrative operations in the Azores and
Portugal.

In any
case, the miscommunication on the artillery issue hampered Drake’s efforts and,
combined with the drunken state of the soldiers, thwarted an attempt at a siege
of the upper city when a tower collapsed on the besieging soldiers and a few
overenthusiastic troops ruined a chance to breach the walls of the upper city.
[see Wernham, p. 110]The soldiers
suffered light losses in Coruna overall, but when they were subsequently
marched to Lisbon, the combined toll of hangovers from the wine and an apparent
outbreak of disease in the torrid Iberian spring collaborated to diminish their
forces considerably.The English
immediately partook in some minor quarrels with Lisbon’s defenders before
heading to the walls of the Spanish-held bastion in the city center.Once again, the English were stymied by their
lack of artillery; they had no siege trains and no means to breach the walls of
their target.Archduke Albert, Philip’s
nephew, was governor in Portugal and withdrew his forces within the city walls,
perhaps cognizant of the invaders’ insurmountable deficiencies in weaponry and
frankly mistrustful of the loyalty of his conscripted Portuguese soldiers.Unable to breach Lisbon, Norris withdrew to
Cascaes and powwowed with Drake, and they both ruled out an amphibious
operation up the river Tagus to Lisbon owing to the fearsome menace of the
river’s defensive guns and, once again, the lack of artillery.

The English
Armada still had the prospect of intercepting the Spanish treasure shipment in
its collective sights.Yet just as the
Spanish Armada had been thwarted by uncooperative weather, so would its English
counterpart be frustrated by the caprice of the local winds, if to a less
destructive degree than the storms that battered Medina Sidonia’s fleet.Capture of the Spanish fleet, as it would
soon be recognized, was indeed within the realm of possibility for the
attenuated English forces, but they were persistently scattered and damaged by
unusually choppy seas that forced them beyond the locations for encountering
the Spanish treasure galleons, and warships protecting the treasure fleet
further damaged and harassed the English ships so as to circumvent their
attempts at engagement.Ultimately, in
June, the English fleet limped back to Plymouth having suffered heavy
casualties—perhaps more than 10,000 participants, the vast majority of its
force, were killed (mostly by disease) or deserted.Shipping losses were much less than those of
the Spanish Armada, but the combined toll caused by the soldiers’ casualties
and the naval confrontations was staggering.The English Armada had cost over £100,000—by some metrics, an even more
substantial operation than the Spanish Armada itself.Yet it had yielded paltry returns.Although some minor Spanish towns had been
sacked and a portion of Philip’s forces diverted from the Netherlands, the
treasure fleet was entirely missed, the Spaniards remained in control of
Portugal, and most importantly, the Spanish navy in Santander and San
Sebastian—a sitting duck for a quartet of adversaries with a torch and an
escape route—remained intact.The defeat
of the English Armada in 1589 proved to be a particularly bitter pill for the
English because of the missed opportunity it represented.Queen Elizabeth I recognized all too acutely
that her forces could have so easily delivered a knockout punch against the
Spanish, but because of mission creep, internecine quarrels, and a string of
small blunders, the effort came up wanting.

Aftermath

The failure
to capture the treasure of the Indies and the persistence of Spanish rule in
Portugal were undeniably infuriating, but by far the most significant outcome
of the English Armada’s defeat was that King Philip’s navy had slipped the
noose.Contrary to what is so often
assumed, the Spanish navy after the
Armada was far stronger than the one before
it, in large part because that navy escaped almost certain disaster in 1589 had
Drake simply landed a small raiding party in Santander.Almost three times as much gold and silver
were transported reliably and efficiently by Spain from the Americas in the 1590s
than in any decade prior.The strength
and renown of the 19th-century British Imperial Navy can seduce and
deceive us into thinking that the English somehow had a natural affinity for
ruling the waves, and the Spanish Armada incident seems an all-too convenient
marker for this ascendancy. Yet as we’ve
seen above, the English definitely did not rule the seas in the aftermath of
the Spanish Armada, in large part due to the failure of its own Armada in
1589.The Spaniards would remain the
dominant sea power well into the 17th century, and when another
nation assumed preeminence on the oceans, it would be the Dutch supplanting
them in the late 1600s, not the English.Only by the mid-1700s does England’s naval prowess begin to assume truly
dominant dimensions, and even then it still had to meet the persistent
challenge of the French.Indeed, the
Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ended the French and Indian War (Seven Years’
War) with a decisive victory for the English, may be considered to be the most
accurate date to mark the rise of the English as the world’s foremost naval
power; it was certainly not the case in 1589.

King Philip
would thoroughly exploit the opportunity handed to him by the failure of the
English Armada in 1589, rebuilding his fleet and using it to great
effectiveness.He instituted a clever
convoy system which, as noted above, proved remarkably effective at protecting
gold and silver shipments; John Hawkins undertook several buccaneering
expeditions with Martin Frobisher in 1589-90, but with little success against
much stronger Spanish defenses.The
English did achieve one partial success in 1596, against Cadiz, and even then
it was rendered bittersweet by the failure to capture the Spanish treasure
fleet in the midst of a scorched-earth policy by the defenders.Otherwise, the 1590s saw a string of
reversals for the English on land and at sea as Philip tightened the screws on
his adversaries.A low-grade naval war
ensued with Spanish forces regularly repelling and often disabling English
attackers on its transatlantic fleets or stationary defenses in the Caribbean
and Latin America.Those quintessential
mariners, Drake and Hawkins, would themselves be killed in a disastrous
offensive against the Spanish at Puerto Rico and Panama in 1595, which proved
even more costly in troops and shipping for the English than the 1589 invasion
of Spain and Portugal.The 1595
operation was designed to be a strike directly at the heart of Spain’s New
World Empire, but the improved, more agile Spanish navy and shrewd
intelligence-gathering enabled the Spanish defenders to surprise and entrap the
English, delivering them one of the worst naval and land defeats the country
would suffer.Other operations, such as
the 1597 Azores expedition led by Essex, met with much the same lackluster
result.Even the English homeland did
not prove immune to attack.Uncooperative weather scattered three additional Armadas sent by King
Philip to launch a large-scale attack, but in 1595 a small Spanish force under
Don Carlos de Amesquita, patrolling the waters of the English Channel and short
of water, was blown ashore near Cornwall.The Spaniards easily intimidated or defeated local militia resistance
and set fire to much of Cornwall, especially Penzance and surrounding locales,
while plundering the hamlets for whatever victuals and nautical aids they could
find.Eventually the English began to
muster a professional army and summon naval forces under Drake and Hawkins, and
the Spanish decamped and returned home after holding Mass on English soil.But Amesquita’s successful operations were
emblematic of the military frustration that befell the English in the decade
after the Armada.

Perhaps the
most important—and tragic—immediate ramifications of the English Armada’s
defeat were in Ireland.England had possessed
a political and military relationship with Ireland since Norman times, when
Henry II launched an invasion in the 12th century and established
nominal Norman rule that was, over time, restricted to a region around Dublin,
the so-called Pale (source of the “Beyond the Pale” idiom so familiar from
everyday discourse).The Normans were
eventually assimilated and Gaelicized to become “more Irish than the Irish
themselves” and Ireland stayed largely autonomous.In the early 1500s, however, Henry VII began
to assert more direct control over the Irish lords and his son, Henry VIII,
followed by proclaiming himself the king of Ireland itself.Henry was too occupied with other matters to
tend to Ireland too aggressively, and it was therefore Mary and Elizabeth who
would assert hegemony most directly over Ireland.Mutual animosity had swollen up between the
Protestant English and Catholic Irish, and royal policy toward the Emerald Isle
was marked by an appalling level of brutality, condescension, and corruption
even in the years before the Armada, inspiring sporadic uprisings and
generalized tension during the 1570s and 1580s.In contrast to the comparatively mild treatment of Catholics on England
proper (relative to the state of affairs on the Continent, at least), those in
Ireland were deemed unworthy of the dignity merely to be left alone, and
treated with both contempt and arbitrary malice by English administrators.Yet England may have otherwise been inclined
to leave the Irish alone overall, if not for the consequences of the English
Armada’s defeat.With Spain’s navy
reconstructed and regrouping after 1589, Ireland loomed strategically as a
potential launching pad and port of comfort for Spanish Catholic invaders, and
English actions toward the island country became more repressive and cruel in
response.The Irish were angered and
began to take up arms in earnest in the 1590s.

The Irish
rebellion against English rule was led by the Gaelic lords of Ulster,
spearheaded initially by Red Hugh O’Donnell but soon joined by the clan of the
O’Neills, which had hitherto been in alliance with the English.Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, had been
steeped in the military tactics and formations used by the English, and would
inflict particularly severe defeats against his erstwhile allies when he took
up the banner of the Gaelic lords in 1594.It was in that year that the O’Donnells would lead native forces against
English forts that had been constructed and garrisoned to suppress the Ulster
lords; upon besieging the forts, the Irish would utilize clever guerrilla
tactics to surround and ambush English supply lines, commencing the so-called
Nine Years’ War with Irish victory under O’Donnell at the Ford of the Biscuits
in 1594.Other victories at Sligo,
Armagh, Blackwater, and Clontibret confirmed the surprising military competence
of the Irish against superior English forces, and in 1598, O’Neill smashed a
professional English force under the accomplished general, Sir Henry Bagenal,
at Yellow Ford.A dramatic and oft-cited
example of cunning waged against a superior army—O’Neill’s soldiers brilliantly
constructed ensconced trenches and earthworks to trap the English in an
ambush—Yellow Ford was the worst defeat ever suffered by the English on Irish
soil.O’Neill would later harass and
evade battle with the Earl of Essex in 1599—the debacle that would effectively
end the young earl’s career—before finally suffering defeat in a set-piece
battle against Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, at Kinsale in 1601.Kinsale effectively broke O’Neill’s power as
leader of a unified Irish national front against the English, but the crafty
Irish lord once again eluded capture and continued guerrilla assaults against
Mountjoy’s forces, frustrating their efforts to reestablish control.Finally, in late 1603, 6 days following the
succession of the English throne from Elizabeth to King James I, O’Neill
accepted favorable terms and ceased his rebellion, remaining in his Ulster home
unmolested.Nevertheless, he and the
other Gaelic lords feared treachery and capture by English garrisons, and four
years later, in the so-called “Flight of the Earls,” O’Neill and his
compatriots decamped for Catholic lands on the Continent, effectively handing
Ireland over to English rule.1607—the
same year as the Jamestown Settlement in North America—is therefore mournfully
recalled by the Irish as the year when effective self-rule was forsaken to the
English.

The Nine
Years’ War had devastating effects for both sides.Much of Ireland—the northern counties in
particular— suffered desolation and a humanitarian catastrophe that, for its
time, exceeded even the most war-ravaged regions of Eastern Europe in WWII in
scale.As in the 30 Years’ War in
Europe, battles and skirmishes were waged in farmlands and churches, forts and
markets alike.Mountjoy burned crops in
the countryside and destroyed much of Ireland’s agricultural and economic base
to subdue native opposition; the result was a manmade famine that rivaled the
infamous Potato Famine of the 1840s in its effects.Perhaps 1/3 of the population lost their
lives, and the combined physical and psychological ruin would etch itself on
the collective soul of the country for hundreds of years, commencing the tragic
history that would continue even into the 21st century.The English, meanwhile, had been lured into a
quagmire reminiscent in some ways of America’s Vietnam fiasco, but even more
severe in its consequences.Ireland
became England’s main battleground after Spain’s reinforced navy frustrated
English buccaneering and sea-borne convoy attacks, and tens of thousands of
English soldiers would lose their lives in the bewildering, almost stupefying
morass of the Irish bogs and forests, felled by disease or the bayonets and
firearms of their clever Irish opponents.All of England’s carefully-laid plans for Irish rule came crumbling
down, precipitating a foreign policy calamity that would alienate the Irish
people and mire the English in a hostile land for centuries.The war in Ireland cost the English crown
£2-3 million, an ulcer that would drain away assets that had carefully been
accumulated for decades.Prior to the
war against Spain in 1585, the shrewd financial stewardship of the Elizabethan
court had nearly effaced the £3 million debt left in 1558 by the profligacy of
Henry VIII and Mary I, and the Queen’s careful implementation of the Anglican
compromise effected by her predecessors contributed enormously to sparing
England from the devastation of the sectarian religious wars that traumatized
the Continent.But the grinding,
unceasing operations against Spain and Ireland would plunge England back into a
debt not much less than that left by Mary in 1558.Contrary to what is often assumed, the later
years of the Elizabethan period in the 1590s were not jolly, heady times with
the country’s people gleefully enjoying their prosperity and military success;
rather, they were marked by the bitter aftertaste of an unsuccessful war, one
that could have been so easily won by the English with a landing by Francis
Drake at Santander in 1589.The mounting
debt of the foreign campaigns sapped the treasury and diverted trade and
commerce.This economic adversity joined
in tandem with unfortunately-timed crop failures and droughts to precipitate
widespread destitution and misery.Soldiers conscripted for the war efforts against Ireland, Spain, and
Philip II’s Continental allies went unpaid, and upon their return (if they
survived—hundreds of thousands did not), they faced often bleak economic
prospects.William Shakespeare, it
should be recognized, was a wartime
playwright.He was not a 16th-century
USO maestro; there is no evidence that he was officially pressed into service
by the court.Yet his plays, both in
their characterization and in their tone and substance, were directed at an
exhausted, impoverished, often fearful population that had endured the effects
of 20 years of war and the concomitant redirection of a nation’s scarce
resources.Both England and Spain suffered
together and, in an irony frequently borne of such situations, began to
sympathize as only two fierce and unremitting enemies can.

When
Elizabeth passed the royal scepter onto James I in 1603, the king was eager to
finally make peace.While he was
dispiritingly lacking in the charisma, panache, and popularity of his Tudor
predecessors, James lucidly grasped the enervation and frustration wrought by
the ongoing war.After negotiating a
peace with the Irish lords, he signed the Treaty of London in 1604, finally
concluding the Twenty Years’ War between England and Spain.The terms, ironically, were similar to those
that Philip II had sought prior to the Spanish Armada in 1588, namely the
cessation of English intervention on the Continent and a renunciation of high
seas buccaneering—which, in any case, had been delivering at best diminishing
returns following the Spanish navy’s refitting in 1589.Spain had achieved many of its war aims but,
like England, had nearly emptied its treasury in the process.It had solidified its New World Empire and
maintained firm control of the seas, but its position on the Continent evinced
a mixed result, in no small part due to English support of Philip II’s
opponents; the southern Dutch provinces (much of what is today Belgium) had
remained Catholic and, with the conversion of France’s King Henry IV to
Catholicism (whether piety or pragmatism or some admixture thereof, we cannot
be certain), a Catholic monarch remained on the French throne.But the northern Dutch provinces had gained
some autonomy, and Philip’s larger objective—placing his daughter, the Infanta
Isabella Clara Eugenia, in control of France—had been thwarted upon Henry’s
conversion.In any case, it was the
fortification and modernization of Spain’s navy and vast overseas empire that
would be Philip’s most important accomplishment of the long war, not his
byzantine machinations on the European Continent, and this strengthening of
Spanish sea-borne power would have far-reaching ramifications that can be felt
up to this day.It is, in fact, in the
areas of colonization and the power of the Crown that the defeat of the 1589
Drake and Norris expedition would exert its most far-reaching effects.

A More Assertive Parliament, and a
Postponed Launch into North America

As noted
above, the failure of Drake to deliver a coup
de grace at Santander in 1589 enabled Philip II to slip the noose, and
compelled a continuation of the Anglo-Spanish hostilities for another 15
years—eventually spreading into Ireland.This bloody, costly conflict depleted the English treasury and sent the
nation deeply into debt.As the economic
historian John Guy has noted, the Elizabethan Exchequer was pressed into
extracting funds from whatever sources were readily available to defray the
war’s incessantly mounting costs, which included ship money, sale of high
offices, auctioning of Crown lands—and turning to Parliament.The sales of offices and crown lands
effectively removed the safety net from the Stuart Dynasty which succeeded the
Tudors; if they mounted their own debts, they had fewer recourses to turn
to.One of those was Parliament, and as
the war dragged on in the 1590s, Parliament began to assert itself more
unequivocally.The English Parliament
had been founded by the medieval English king, Edward I, in the 1200s. While it had a measure of real power and
exercised authority on some occasions—it was Parliament, after all, that
fulfilled the terms of Henry VIII’s will in the succession of his children to
the throne—the Parliament was still regarded as an instrument subordinate to
the monarch well into the Tudor period.When the monarch was compelled to become a supplicant, however, it was
perhaps inevitable that the members of the Parliament began to view themselves
as more integral to the English governing system than the king or queen might
be otherwise inclined to acknowledge.Parliamentarians were also more likely to be religiously fervent, and on
several occasions they entered into open conflict with Elizabeth in the 1590s.Strife between monarch and Parliament
remained at a low ebb into the 17th century, but having savored such
a taste of financial and—as a result—political power, Parliament was loath to
relinquish it when James I and his Scottish Stuart Dynasty took the reins of
England in 1603.James had an unfortunate
propensity to enhance his wardrobe and royal trappings beyond the bounds of
good sense and limited budgets, plunging the Crown even further into debt above
that which it had inherited from Elizabeth.James became even more dependent upon Parliament, which began to exert
more and more genuine authority in running the country.Finally, when James’s son, Charles I, took
power, a clash between the absolutism of the Stuarts and the then-novel power
arrangements of a Parliamentary body became inevitable, culminating in the
English Civil Wars of the mid-1600s.With that famous (or infamous, depending on your disposition)
Parliamentary general, Oliver Cromwell, victorious against Charles’s powerful
Royalist forces, history had experienced a turning point, since England would
turn decisively away from the authoritarian monarchical rule that would
characterize the European Continent—the precursor, of course, for the
perceptions of rights and responsibilities that would give rise to the American
Revolution in the 1770s.A victory by
Drake in that 1589 battle would have stillborn Parliament’s snowballing power;
after all, with an early conclusion to the Anglo-Spanish conflict availed by
the effective destruction of Philip II’s navy, there would have been no need
for the massive outlays to continue the war in the 1590s against a defeated
Spain, and no need to so aggressively fear the security threat of a Catholic
Ireland.Indirectly, Spanish victory in
1589 had precipitated the rapidly shifting relationship between monarch and
Parliament that would prove so crucial for the history of England and its North
American colonies from the 1600s onward.

Speaking of
North America, furthermore, the English Armada’s defeat would change the course
of history.As noted above, had Spain’s
navy been destroyed in its mooring places in Santander and San Sebastian in
1589, the country would have possessed inadequate defenses for its young,
vulnerable New World Empire, then disputed territory among the Protestant
nations (and some Catholic ones) in Western Europe who refused to honor the
Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, in which Pope Alexander VI effectively
recognized Spanish hegemony over the Western Hemisphere.England had already made overtures toward
long-term North American settlement.At
last following up on the Cabot expedition of 1497, the English tepidly
attempted colonies on the landmass.In
1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert led an expedition to seek a Northwest Passage
through the icy Arctic waters of Canada toward China, as well as to establish a
colony in Newfoundland, which had been hitherto explored and claimed for
England by Cabot and where a small fishing community had planted itself.Gilbert further explored the coast, charting
and reconnoitering the inlets that dotted the Eastern Canadian region, but he
encountered problems with discipline among his sailors and suffered in the
harsh, unfamiliar seas.One of his ships
was stranded inland and a small group of would-be settlers lost, possibly
killed by the harsh climate and confrontations with native tribes, and Gilbert
himself would fare little better.Deprived of much of his crew, which had been beset by scurvy and
seasickness, Gilbert’s ship The Squirrel
became caught in a ferocious storm and disappeared into the waves.He had made a valiant effort, but had
accomplished little above the claim already made by Cabot nearly a century
earlier.Gilbert’s half-brother Sir
Walter Raleigh, however, would carry his relative’s dream forward with greater
planning and foresight, and would initially meet with greater success.Raleigh founded the Roanoke colony in 1585 in
what is now Virginia, and in 1586, the first English child born in the New
World—Virginia Dare—would be christened.Raleigh had achieved substantial progress over Gilbert’s initial
unsuccessful attempt, but there were signs of danger at the outset.Many settlers were succumbing to exotic
diseases of the new continent and the merciless harshness of the elements, and
relations with the indigenous tribes were fractious at best.On several occasions the Roanoke colony
required resupply and rescue, and it had not yet reached the point of
self-sustenance.The Roanoke
colonization effort coincided almost precisely with the onset of hostilities
against Spain, and victory against the Spaniards was desperately sought so as
to free up supply expeditions to the colony following the Armada attack in
1588.Once again, a success by Drake in
1589 against the helpless Spanish fleet would have kneecapped England’s bitter
enemy and opened the sea lanes, perhaps enabling a rescue of the fledgling
colony.But the fiasco in Coruna and
Portugal by the Drake and Norris expedition obviated any such attempts in the
New World, the settlement of which was now consigned to a lower priority.When John White, the leader of the Roanoke
Colony, finally managed to return to it in 1591, he found to his dismay that
the settlement had vanished, with that ever-fascinating historical enigma—the
single word, Croatoan, carved on a
tree—providing only the slightest hint about its fate.Recently, historians and meteorologists have
managed to demonstrate that an unusually harsh drought and winter would have
wrought havoc on settler and native alike in the region, crushing the colony’s
hopes in the absence of supply from across the ocean.It would not come; all ships had to be ready
against Spain.

The defeat
of the English Expedition to Spain and Portugal in 1589, therefore, contributed
integrally to one of the more commonly observed ironies about the Tudor
era:Despite their manifest interest in
emulating the Iberian countries by starting their own colonies in the Western
Hemisphere, which the Spaniards had initiated in 1492, the Tudors were unable
to establish a permanent English settlement.Clearly, as demonstrated by the endeavors of Gilbert and Raleigh above,
this was not for lack of effort; rather, the continuing military strength and
naval might of Spain posed such an imminent threat that it competed with and
thwarted English colonial ambitions which were just stirring in the 1580s.Ironically, English settlement and
Empire-building in the Americans would begin as a Stuart project, not a Tudor
one, and once again we can witness the hand of the 1589 battle in all
this.Had Spain been deprived of its
navy and purloined of its treasure fleet by Drake and Norris, as it so nearly
was, the English would have been free to continue their earnest project of
North American settlement—along with, of course, taking advantage of the spoils
of weakened Spanish colonial defenses in the New World.Indeed, the English maintained a continuing
interest in Spain’s colonies for centuries; possessions in the Caribbean would
change hands on multiple occasions, and even in the 19th century,
the English made a daring play—bold but ultimately unsuccessful against the
defenses of Buenos Aires—to take Argentina.History would have unfolded quite differently indeed in the event of a
Drake landing in Santander in 1589.

Spain’s
centuries-long hold on its coveted New World Empire, after all, hinged
fundamentally on its capacity to protect it from competitors.Furthermore, the Spanish cultural sphere that is conventionally associated with
South and Central America and the Caribbean today, was a direct product of
Spain’s military capabilities—or lack thereof—in forging a coherent naval and
land-based defense for the vast landmasses of the Western Hemisphere.Newspapers and newsmagazines of our modern
day and age in 2003 and 2004 marvel at the rapid Hispanic demographic and
cultural expansion in the United States over the past two decades, but the
roots of this phenomenon date back to the latter decades of the 1500s.The Hispanic efflorescence of recent years is
predominantly a product of immigration, of course, with strong economic tugs
pulling in workers and families from south of the border.Yet the culture
of these immigrants could have easily been far different from what it is
today.Most of these newcomers are
identified as “Latino” or “Hispanic” precisely because of the common thread of
the Spanish language and culture, and as we’ve seen above, Spain’s cultural
influence on these regions could have easily been nipped in the bud, with
Spanish viceroys and missionaries evicted from much of what is now Latin
America had there been a slightly different result in 1589.Philip II could not have defended Spain’s
fledgling and sprawling overseas empire in the aftermath of a navy destroyed by
Francis Drake’s forces.Even such
Hispanic bastions of today like Puerto Rico and Panama were sites of
anti-Spanish operations by John Hawkins, Francis Drake, and other English naval
geniuses, and these tenuous colonies could have been pried loose in the event
of a moribund Spain in the 1590s.One
might counter, of course, that Florida, Texas, and California—places that had been part of the Spanish Empire—are, after all, now a part of the
(predominantly) English-speaking United States.But this has absolutely nothing to do with actions of the British
Empire, much less the Tudors; all of these territories were acquired by the US
after it itself had prevailed in battle against the British in the American
Revolution of the late 1700s.Moreover,
precisely because of the longstanding
association of these territories with the Spanish Empire, their laws, customs,
and traditions derive substantially from Spanish precursors, in a manner far
distinct from, say, New England or the American Midwest, which lacked any such
historical connection to New Spain.Let’s
take a closer look at this.

There are a
number of basic discrepancies in the revolutionary histories of the United
States and Latin America.The
earth-shaking revolution of the former preceded those in the latter, and the
American government created in the late 1700s differed vastly from any other in
the world.However, another fundamental
difference, oft-overlooked, is in the manner by which the land, resources, and
imperial claims of the mother country devolved onto the successor states that
emerged in the wake of the revolution.Virtually all of what is now “Latin America” was, at one point, under
the control of the Spanish Crown (or the Portuguese monarchy, in the case of
Brazil).Therefore, when the revolutions
led by Agustin Iturbide in Mexico and Simon Bolivar in South America swept away
Spain’s control in the early 19th century, the new Spanish-speaking
countries simply inherited the territory that had been part of the Spanish
Empire itself.The native American
contributions were significant in each case, but as far as the European component of the new nations’
cultural fabric, it was overwhelmingly derived from the Spanish rulers who had
directly controlled the areas for centuries.The legal systems were direct descendants of Spanish precursors, and the
administration, customs, and institutions of the young states hailed directly
from Spain.While many Latin American
countries engaged in border wars with each other during the 19th
century, their frontiers merely shifted within an enormous territorial span
which had once been designated on maps as “New Spain.”

The
situation in the United States was radically different.Nearly all of the territory within the
landmass of the “United States of America” was
never under the control of the British Empire.Only the Oregon Territory—which now comprises
much of the American Northwest—and, of course, the original 13 colonies on the
East Coast were actually incorporated within Britain’s colonial realm.Therefore, when the independence of the US was
recognized by Britain in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the young nation
inherited only that strip of land on the East Coast of North America, bordering
the Atlantic Ocean, from the British.The vast majority of the territory that now comprises the U.S.A. was
acquired in the 19th century, after
the United States had become an independent nation with its own unique culture
and form of government—in stark contrast with Latin America.Moreover, and most importantly, the bulk of
U.S. territory rests on land that had been part of the French, Spanish, and Russian empires, not the British.The unprecedentedly rapid expansion of the
U.S. occurred chiefly through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803—by which the
country acquired previously French domains—and the Mexican War of 1846-48, in
which the United States obtained previously Spanish and, after the revolution
of 1821, Mexican land.Florida was
originally a Spanish colony, and Alaska was a Russian outpost until Secretary
of State William Seward negotiated its purchase in 1867.

In
practical terms, the result of all this is that, as far as the European contribution to United States
laws, history, administration, and culture (which of course is in addition to
the undeniable contributions of the native Americans), it is far more
heterogeneous than in Latin America, especially west of the Mississippi
River.U.S. legal traditions owe much to
the customs of English common law, and on the East Coast, the contribution of
the common law—and its impact on everything from land grants to courthouse
oaths—is clearly predominant.However,
as we travel westward toward the Pacific, we begin to notice an increasing
legacy of French and Spanish legal traditions in addition to the English common
law and, of course, the uniquely American standards that emerged from the ideas
of the Founding Fathers in the late 1700s.In Florida, Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and many other
states, the law codes still bear strong witness to their Spanish heritage, and
place names throughout the American Midwest and Southwest lucidly evoke the
colonial histories of France and Spain in the region.The architecture and physical layout of New
Mexico, Arizona, and California draws substantial inspiration from the Spanish
missions that traversed these areas for centuries.Even the American cowboy culture and the
rodeo trace their roots to the customs of New Spain—specifically, the vaqueros of northern Mexico, prior to
the U.S. conquest in 1848.

It is here
that, once again, we can gaze in abundance at the momentous impact of that little-known
battle in 1589.Had Drake alighted at
his initial destination of Santander, and torched the unguarded Spanish fleet,
then Spain’s operations in North America would have been curtailed drastically,
and a newly-dominant English navy would have been able to forcefully assert the
claims to the continent first made by John Cabot for the English crown in
1497.Just as the Caribbean and South
and Central America would have been opened to English colonial ambitions, the
North American landmass from Mexico to the Hudson Bay would have been laid bare
to Spain’s competitors.Spanish missions
and operations in northwestern Mexico and what is now the US Southwest would
have been stillborn; deprived of viceroyal leadership and the financial backing
of the Spanish crown, the Spanish settlers in these regions would have been
obliged to quit them, and retrench to a far smaller, more defensible New
Spain.

Instead,
with the English Armada defeated in 1589, the more nimble, efficient Spanish
navy was able to more effectively deliver supplies and communicate with the
colonies of its vast possessions in the New World.Spanish law, customs, and language permeated
not only the Empire’s heartland in central and South America, but permeated the
rolling desert realms of North America for centuries.Drake himself had staked a claim to
California during his famous circumnavigation in the 1570s, and he may have
been able to realize that claim with a success in 1589; instead, Spain reinforced
the sea route control in the Atlantic and Pacific that was so essential to its
dominance in the Western Hemisphere, expanding into and consolidating the
then-uncharted territory north of the Gulf of California.This territory devolved upon Mexico upon its
independence from Spain in 1821, and despite the conquest by the United States
of half of Mexico’s territory in the Mexican War that concluded in 1848, the
Spanish colonial presence in the region left a powerful cultural imprint that
remains pronounced today.This, of
course, is on top of Spanish expansion into the Pacific, in the Philippines and
the numerous archipelagos which dot that vast ocean.

The next
time you encounter another newspaper article heralding the almost inexplicably
fast rise of Hispanic culture and the rapid movement of Hispanic peoples into
the US, think back to the 1500s and recall that this cultural colossus, with a
common mooring in the culture of Spain, could have easily been cut down to size
by a few changes in the execution of a battle plan by some deservedly famous
English soldiers in 1589.The expedition
by Drake and Norris in that year is probably an event you’ve never encountered
until now, but the decisions made and battles encountered by that invasion
force would exert a tremendous impact on the unfolding of events both in Europe
and the Americas.Its effects can be
seen every day you stroll by one of those seemingly ubiquitous “Se habla
español” signs in the window of a local shop.

For more information on the
persistent myths and fallacies surrounding the Spanish Armada battle, read my
accompanying article on Wes’s Spanish Armada Page: Top 10 Myths and Muddles about the Spanish
Armada.

Cheyney, Edward P. A history of England from
the defeat of the Armada to the death of Elizabeth, with an account of
English institutions during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries.P. Smith, New York, 1926.

The Spanish Armada 1588 site by Invicta Media—concise,
easily readable, and information-rich summary of the Armada plans and
point-by-point description, with nice, easily visualizable technical
descriptions.

Spanish Armada article at Wikipedia—the free online encyclopedia is a
collaborative effort of many hands worldwide.I’m one of the contributors to the Spanish Armada article, but there
were many before me, and this resource is so accurate and useful in general
that it deserves mention here.

The Defeat of the Spanish Armada pages on the
HistoryBuff site, Rick Brown’s outstanding resource for those seeking primary
documents and old newspapers—an excellent aid for professional historians and
history buffs alike.I wrote this series
of pages on the Spanish Armada in an “encyclopedia style” to provide a ready
and useful reference for students and teachers seeking information on the
battle.The pages are split into
articles covering the factors leading to the Armada, the confrontation itself,
and its aftermath, as well as summary and conclusion sections for rapid
consultation.

The UK History
Learning Site Spanish Armada page—without doubt one of the best I’ve
seen on the Armada encounter, detailed yet easy to follow.A particularly interesting aspect of this
site is its demonstration that the always unpredictable weather factor wasn’t
as unfavorable to the Spaniards as is often assumed.There were sudden shifts in winds that
enabled Medina Sidonia’s fleet to escape a catastrophic beaching on the Dutch
and French shorelines, as well as to regroup and assume its tight defensive
formation.